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Next Steps On The Pathway to Mars

Kent Rominger has spent more than 1,600 hr. in space, all in low Earth orbit. The two-time shuttle commander has a host of memories on which to reflect, including how unbelievably fast the coast of Florida receded as he soared aloft on his first launch. But it was his first look in the other direction that really sticks in his mind.

“The most incredible thing I’ve ever seen is the color looking out into space—and that color is black—a black so dark, so stark, so vast, I’d never seen anything like it before,” he recalls. “And then it dawned on me, well, it is not the color, it is not the black that is so captivating. What I was really appreciating was the vastness of space. Without the atmosphere, I could tell I was looking trillions and trillions of miles into the depths of space, and it really struck me.”

That vastness, that sense of possibility that has drawn explorers like Rominger since the first protohumans wandered out of Africa an instant ago in cosmic time—or millions of Earth orbits around the Sun—is the backdrop to the push to go beyond this planet that began with Yuri Gagarin’s launch in 1961. It continued last month when an American, a Russian and a German lifted off from that same pad in Kazakhstan for the International Space Station (photo).

Maxim Suraev, Alexander Gerst and Reid Wiseman reached their destination 6 hr. later. That is as deep into space as humans have gone—with the exception of a few flights to the Hubble Space Telescope and other slightly higher targets in low Earth orbit—since Apollo 17 started its return trip from the Moon Dec. 14, 1972.

The space station is the engineering marvel of our age—a spaceship the length of a football field where six people conduct cutting-edge scientific research while refining our collective skill at operating above the atmosphere. But the space agencies of the world do not agree on where we should go next with that hard-won expertise. There are not that many choices, and the few that there are will not be easy. Mars, it seems, is as far as humankind can practicably expect to go, for now.

“Based on limitations to human physiology, based on reasonable technical limitations to the ability to shield humans during long voyages in interplanetary space, the horizon goal for human space exploration is Mars,” says Jonathan Lunine, a top planetary scientist at Cornell University, who co-chaired the recent U.S. National Research Council (NRC) human-spaceflight study. “Now, horizon in this case essentially means the farthest goal. It is not the only goal.”

Nor will it be cheap. Ultimately, the NRC panel found, the human exploration of Mars will take “decades” of work, and cost “hundreds of billions” of dollars. No one has that kind of money—not the U.S., not China and not, in the foreseeable future, all of the spacefaring nations and wannabees put together.

“I would not want to indulge in specious precision to say whether it was $300 billion or $500 billion, but it is a lot of money,” says John C. Sommerer, a retired Applied Physics Laboratory engineer who headed the subcommittee that drafted the technical portion of the NRC report. “Given that we currently spend on the order of $8 billion [annually in the U.S.] on human spaceflight, you immediately understand why it is a long-term program.”

Although humans are getting a robot’s-eye view of the Martian surface every day, courtesy of the Curiosity rover (see page 40), no one even pretends there will be a human landing there until the 2030s at the earliest. Most of the world’s space agencies include Mars in their exploration plans, but only NASA treats it as a viable goal toward which work is ongoing now that is designed to make it happen.

Like the U.S. space program from its earliest days, NASA’s latest plan is a product of pragmatism, pork-barrel politics and some brilliant engineering. There is also an element of blarney—Administrator Charles Bolden says it will take only “a modest increase” in funding to land humans on Mars in 20 years or so, following the path NASA has cobbled together since the Obama administration ordered a course change five years ago (AW&ST April 28, p. 20).

That has since been amended to funding “consistent with economic growth.” The NRC panel, and many other skeptics, would beg to differ. But Bolden—who commanded the shuttle mission that went deeper into space than any other to put the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit—is right on target when he says Congress isn’t going to give the space program almost 4% of the federal budget, as it did during the Cold War race to the Moon. He is also right when he says “we are farther down the road [to deep space] than we have been for a long, long, long time.”

Discuss this Article 13

Here's a question. How NECESSARY is human space presence on Mars? I'd say the answer to that question is "Not at all." No science that can be done on Mars absolutely requires a warm body to do it on planet or in orbit.

You're right we totally don't need human boots on the ground there. Mars is like exploring Antarctica except with no air or supplies. Fun stuff. I think some private firm ought to go there (Are you listening Elon?) and charge like a billion $ per passenger. Other than to collect rocks and "say we did" I don't see any reason to go to Mars in my lifetime.

Now if you put some humanoid robots controlled via VR on the surface it would be very cool. 5 to 20 minute radio delays (that darn speed-of-light problem) would require lots of patience for the VR operators.

Human space exploration is not about science, although it will benefit science enormously in the long run. Life coming out of the sea onto the land had nothing to do with science, yet it was still very important. For fundamentally important biological reasons, Life likes to expand into new environments and explore them thoroughly. This strategy broadens its base, and helps it survive when Change comes along, as it does quite often.

If we make it a priority, we could have one or more independently self-sustaining human settlements off the Earth by the end of this century. When that is accomplished, earth life will be effectively immortal on a time scale of millions to billions of years.

Is this really NECESSARY? Well, not quite, yet many people think it is important. I believe human space exploration is also part of NASA's basic mission statement, so it is a matter of prior consensus, and the burden of changing that should be on the skeptics. Nonetheless, explaining this fundamental objective in ways that are understandable and convincing to the widest possible audience is an important responsibility for all who agree it is our bedrock aim.

There are fundamental socio-economic conditions which were greatly improved for Europeans in gaining access to most of the items in your list (I would argue that heart transplantation is iffy because it takes away impetus from genomics and printable biologics as future generation fixes to the genetics as much as morphologic/immune compatible direct replacements without the flaw).

It takes the human brain at least half a century to -begin- to learn how to use what it has and the longer you live, the less R-Breeding obsessed you will be with pushing bad genes forward but this will have economic outcomes which are not immediately beneficial or visible to a consumer driven idiot world.

There is a vastly lower level of return possible from Mars overall.

I would suggest that it could be an Alexandrian Library and lifeboat for intelligence when we fail to contain our population and the capitalist system of exploiting everyone for profit creates such an enormous resource deficit that Malthus comes with Five Horsemen predictable results.

Beyond that, Mars is dead because Mars has no magnetosphere. Whatever collision or near miss nearly destroyed it in The Great Before has sucked the life from it's core and no core EM = no protection from CBR.

Which means man will -never- live on the surface of the red planet, though he may find it cheaper to harvest iron and EML chuck it into space for orbital construction slipways than it is here.

The achievements we make on Mars will have more to do with installing protected colonies on other worlds which are not yet terraformed and thus must be considered hostile in terms of biospheric risks, even if they have a breathable atmosphere.

In this, you are looking at sending people on 20-100 year long journeys without any hope of Earth rescue, such that even with near FTL 'space warping', you will need to engage in either cryosleep from which humans will be very grumpy and weak on wakeup. Or exogenic creation of new seed cultures, on-arrival.

Either one of these conditions argues against the absurd proposition currently being discussed for more jocks in spaaaace! under 'Mars 10' or 'Mars Cheap' as I like to call it.

Because risk mitigation is all about controlling your interval _in the danger zone_ as much as what you can or cannot do to negate threats while there.

Here, the real needs are for SERIOUS (ontologically aware, self-adaptive and mutually repairing) robotics technology which is not subject to a 10-13 minute radio lag and can set up and maintain highly complex machines with a limited stock of replacement parts.

And last but not least, an admission that the idiots who followed Von Braun to Chemical Rockets set us on a false pathway. Hydrogen has something like 142 megajoules per kilogram. Uranium's equivalent value is EIGHTY MILLION.

The difference is one of launching a grain silo _cap_ into LEO. Vs. launching The Capitol Dome into an interplanetary transfer orbit without regard to 'every two years' nearest matching geometries.

Until and unless we get off our high horses about nuclear propulsion (Orion) we will _never_ move enough mass between worlds at a sufficient rate to be able to protect astronauts in transfer (1m thick ceramic-gold laminate radiation armor) humans or provide them that critical 'safe to safe' transfer from a ship to a prebuilt underground facility where they are removed from katabatic winds, micro meteor showers and of course CBR. ASAP.

If we're going to do this, we need to Go Big because Going Economy is just playing around with Wright Brothers level experimental technology from the pipesmoker's prototype shop. None of which is capable of hard work in rough conditions.

The NICE thing is that if we do the ATBM (Automated Tunnel Boring Machine) trick similar to what dug the Chunnel, we can at least have the basic complex dug in two or three years from start. And it doesn't need human interaction while it works which means that all the supply logistics and exposure conditions for a human living on Mars goes away as you dig a 20-50 story building, sideways, underground.

This much at least, we could do fairly quickly.

Provided we have mass-transfer propulsion mechanics to pay for it (scramjets with air liquification to orbit, hauling individual 10 ton segments on X-37 type robotic shuttles to build a construction dock and then for a 200m ship and finally 300+ nuclear charges to take the pushplate equipped ship from an OTV HEO to interplanetary velocity)

All from launch points 'someplace near the south pole' where an orbital accident doesn't mean much.

We could do this. But we need to do it for the species, not just for economics. And we need to do it in a fashion that is compatible with pragmatic safety and heavy construction needs. Not another fist-thru-skin Eagle lander.

When you have bureaucrats and politicians in the mix you can throw out any reasonable response to this question. The fact is we could have sent humans to mars with sixties hardware half a century ago. With a nuclear rocket they could get there quickly without the need for years of weightlessness in space. The name of the then proposed ship (a model still in production) is The Pilgrim Observer. Today we have an advanced version called the Nautilus X. Curiously the main reason these ideas have never gone forward is because of the use of nuclear propulsion. We send nuclear powered satellites all over the solar system, and Voyager has gone beyond even that, but a nuclear rocket is somehow different to the point of unthinkable which escapes my understanding.
Space X has finally broken the launcher monopoly, and a cheap lift to orbit and beyond is within sight. So what is this talk of hundreds of billions of dollars, when we can get there on the cheap? Don’t forget Bigelow’s inflatable’s (that are orbiting earth today) could be used to build a really huge spacecraft to fly to Mars, and possibly used to construct a cheap rotating habitat with artificial gravity that could orbit Mars for decades. We can scale up any of these ideas with current technology.

"...exploration of Mars will take “decades” of work, and cost “hundreds of billions” of dollars".
So far, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been placed between 4-6 trillion dollars. According to the Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government 2013 report, the *interest* bill alone was around $260 billion.
So, it doesn't have to be such a long-term program. It just needs the political will to get it done

Like Tommy, I really would be interested in see the financial calculations of a sustainable manned Mars mission...how, for instance, the 'rough estimate' of several 100s B$ was arrived at...Meanwhile the possible landing date keeps being pushed farther and farther in the future.
The coming ocean rise will force the economy to change goals, and very few will favor investing in space travel.
Basically, short of some breakthrough in physics, I begin to think a manned Mars mission will never happen in this century.

Obviously the solution is in bringing the cost down using newer propulsion systems that allow bringing a reusable spacecraft to orbit in one piece and then accelerating it to Mars using the sun wind. We are a notch away from utilizing these technologies.

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